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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing, which was essentially what we call public cloud now.

In a slightly different universe Sun would be AWS.

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> Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing […]

Not (just) talking, but offering:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud

Also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine

Sun kept touting a service that we would call cloud, and I kept trying to buy it for one of my financial clients, but it never happened...

Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.

Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7.

Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and we delivered more benefits to our users.

It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not surprising that they were going under.

I worked at Sun for a period on Sun Grid. There were two offerings - one aimed at B2B and one that was public-facing. The latter was launched as network.com, and essentially offered the ability to submit a job and only pay for the processing power used, hence Scott McNealy's "$1 per CPU per hour!" utility computing promotion.

The B2B side (which is the implementation I worked on) was quite a bit different, with customers uploading a 'golden image' into a node which would then be used to pre-provision a pod of servers (i.e 512 x v20z) on demand.

There's certainly an argument that Sun were first to tout cloud IaaS, but what was missing was a decent API to all this.

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